I happened across this article while reading my forums: Calif. diving program helps anchor ex-inmates.
I like this because it takes non-violent felons and giving them training to be productive citizens to avoid recidivism. According to the article, untrained parolees reoffend around 70% of the time. Parolees who go through this training have reoffended at the rate of 6%.
I think this is great. This is a great program, no doubt about it. But I do have a problem with it. Our schools turn out stupid adults. Adults who are unqualified for real life. So what do these untrained failures do? Anything to provide an income. Which mainly includes committing crimes. Which leads to jail time.
What do you think would happen, how much public money could we save, if we instilled a positive work ethic in our youth, showing them that nothing worth having is ever obtained easily. We need to do this when they are young. Show them how to be responsible with money, responsible for themselves, and then give them the positive feedback they need to succeed. Not the phony self-esteem building that our schools do today, but really giving them what we called in the Navy, “Attaboys” and “Awshits.”
We need to help our children to be proud of their accomplishments, and learn from their failures. We must be able to fail, because that is when the real learning is administered. If you are never allowed to fail because it would “damage your self-esteem,” what are we really teaching our children?
Let’s invest our money on the front end, rather than the back end. It is much more cost-effective to do it that way.

I’ve often said if you do the wrong thing, or even the right thing for the wrong reasons, it will come back and bite you in the ass when you least expect it.
Well, I had heard about some nasty comments about Tony Snow’s passing on Daily Kos’s blog. I found this instead: Court rules strip-search of 13-year old for ibuprofen unconstitutional.
It’s the story about a girl who was strip searched on the accusation that she had ibuprofen. She was forced to strip to her underwear, then stretch her bra and panties out to show that she was not hiding anything.
What’s the point that I am trying to make? Who is responsible for the “Zero-tolerance” policy that our schools have? Liberals. They don’t trust anybody to make decisions for themselves, so let’s rule out everything, including over-the-counter medications. It is this same mindset that caused schools to be “gun-free” zones, leading to the bloody path from Columbine to Virginia Tech and beyond.
When people have their rights taken away, bad things happen.
Just to hear about the hypocrisy, here’s some of what they had to say:

We do not need our school to be made into mini prisons. I am sick to death of everyone is a criminal approach that seems to be pervasive in our society now…
If that was my child they would have had to arrest me to keep from knocking the crap out of whoever violated my child that way. Very few things set me off towards violence – that would be one of them.

This only strengthens the old axiom “A Conservative is a Liberal who was mugged.”